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0 pointsjacques_chester13y ago0 comments

You need to avoid lumping all economists into a single heading. It's easy to debunk abstract models by saying "they're not a model of the real world!"

Well, yes. The economists know that.

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josephlord13y ago· 2 in thread

The book is worth a read. Alarming large numbers of economists base work working up from these models and theories based on them.

You might have noticed a little recent global credit crunch which was not predicted by most economists but was predicted and modeled by the author of the book I linked who is an economist (so I don't lump them all together) but the overall level of the state of economics is so poor as a discipline at understanding the overall economy it should be embarrassing to them.

I am genuinely interested if someone has a critical analysis of the Debunking Economics book that points out how and where it wrong but when I last looked I couldn't find any serious attacks online (minor nitpicks only) but I think it is largely being ignored by those who disagree so I haven't found their counter arguments.

jacques_chesterOP13y ago

Economists don't predict most events, because most events in economics are unpredictable. It's a subject of complex, chaotic systems.

If you take this as your starting point for critique (the weathermen didn't predict Weather Event X!!!), you will always win the argument because you're beating up a strawman. No economist has ever seriously claimed specific predictive power.

All an economist can give you is generalised statements of causality, most of which will be unobservable. Steve Keen was not the first to point this out. Quite a few economists from various schools have picked flaws with general equilibria models of macroeconomic phenomena (ie, using calculus to describe people, markets and countries).

josephlord13y ago

The weathermen can give you probability ranges for various events and their models include the possibility of storms. Many widely used economic models do not have the capability to model crashes at all. Many models don't cover banks, debt or money at all.

I don't expect a model to tell me that the markets will crash tomorrow but I would have expected widely use models to indicate that we were in dangerous period in 2005-2007 and that the upwards path was impossible to sustain over a 10 year period.

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